In the production and packaging of cookies and similar baked items, cookie dough, etc. is deposited on a plurality of parallel conveyor tapes, and the conveyor tapes move the cookie dough through an oven. Usually the conveyor tapes carry the hot baked cookies beyond the oven and through an enrobing device and a cooling area. The enrober coats the cookies with chocolate, etc. and the cooler not only reduces the temperature of the cookies but causes the cookies to become less pliable, more stable and less sticky. Once the cookies have been cooled, the cookies must be stacked and loaded into cookie trays or other receptacles for shipment to the retail market. Typically, the infeed conveyor tapes each move the cookies at a rate of 350 to 450 cookies per minute through the oven, and there can be from 16 to 30 lines of conveyor tapes operating at a single time in one cookie production system.
In the past, the cookies would be gathered by hand from the conveyor lines and placed in containers, such as bags, etc. This hand loading process occasionally caused too many or too few cookies to be placed in a package, and a substantial amount of breakage and waste resulted from the hand operations. Further, hand loading of cookies is expensive.
Automated cookie loading devices have been developed in recent years which avoid the expense of manual handling of the cookies and which can function to place the proper number of cookies in each container. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,290,859, 3,500,984, 4,098,392, 4,394,899, 4,413,462 and 4,718,538 disclose automated machines for loading cookies and similar items into containers.
It has become popular for cookies to be merchandized in open topped trays which hold the cookies in edge standing attitude so that a large number of cookies occupy a relatively small space, and so that the tray can protect the cookies from external impact and abrasion with respect to other products and avoid deterioration of the cookies in the packages. When cookies are placed in a cookie tray, usually two or three rows of cookies for one tray, it is desirable that the cookies be properly oriented in the tray. It is relatively easy to stack circular cookies into cookie trays because it does not matter if the cookies have been rotated somewhat with respect to each other; however, when the uniformly but irregularly shaped non-circular cookies are to be stacked in a cookie tray, it is important that the cookies all be uniformly oriented within the tray. Typically, the rectangular cookies will be placed in side edge standing relationship, so that the lengths of the cookies extend across the cavity of the tray and the widths of the cookies extend vertically.
In order to achieve this uniform orientation of the side edge standing cookies within the cookie trays, it is desirable that the cookies be oriented on the conveyor system leading away from the cookie oven and toward the loader in a shingle stacked side edge standing relationship, and that the cookies in the shingle stack be oriented substantially vertically as the cookies are transferred from the line of cookies on the conveyor system to the cookie trays. With this process, the stacking mechanism does not have to contend with cookies that are not properly oriented, so that the stacking function can simply transfer the properly oriented cookies to the awaiting cookie trays.